Friday, July 31, 2015

Leader

People + Opinion : Miscellaneous

Paul White

The world is full of questions, ranging from the really big ones, such as ‘Is life really just software running on a computer made of meat?’ to ‘Where did I put my car keys?’ Somewhere between those you might ask yourself about music and where it fits into our lives. In a world dominated by TV talent shows churning out Cowell’oke, why is it that so many people, even young people, still gravitate towards material released half a century ago? Everybody has a bias of course, usually influenced by the music that was around during their formative years, but that doesn’t explain why so many of today’s teenagers are rediscovering bands like Led Zeppelin or sneaking off to Quo concerts.

Thinking back to the bands that were around in my school days — many of which are still gigging between picking up their pension cheques — I can identify at least two elements that engaged my interest. Firstly, music was often as much about the instrumental elements of a song as the vocals, and the vocals didn’t necessarily need to be technically perfect to work. With a few notable exceptions, such as Bob Dylan, it was about bands more than it was about singers and the vocals were just part of the overall picture, not the picture itself. This is in direct contrast to much of today’s music where the vocals are technically perfect, somewhat anonymous in character and usually sit over an equally perfect but desperately bland backing track.

Secondly — and I feel this is vitally important — back then artists were given the freedom to experiment rather than being hounded by accountants to come up with a record that would sell in even greater numbers than their previous one. We’ve all heard the stories of ‘the establishment’ trying to suppress songs and albums such as Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and Pink Floyd’s The Wall, thinking them too long or too depressing, only to have then become massive successes, so what does anyone really know?

These days you no longer need the blessing of a record company to get your music heard, and you no longer have to pay for expensive studio time in order to record it, though you won’t necessarily make any money from it either. This should be liberating, but I get the impression that a lot of musicians — other than some of the more adventurous dance-music composers and more experimental artists, such as Imogen Heap, for example — are trying to ‘manufacture’ what they think record buyers want to hear. A few commercially minded people can actually make that approach work, but looking back, the music that has stood the test of time has invariably come from artists that found their own direction. Despite commercial pressures, I can’t really see that changing, so if you want to become the next big thing, then you stand a better chance by putting commercial concerns to one side, doing your own thing and just hoping it catches on. At least you’ll have fun along the way.

The history of rock & roll is littered with breakup albums, and early this year the genre received a notable addition in the form of Björk’s Vulnicura. The futuristic experimentation of 2011’s Biophilia has given way to exquisite yet stark string arrangements, written by Björk, augmented by cutting–edge electronics, again courtesy of Björk, mostly in collaboration with young electronic music artists Arca, the Haxan Cloak and Spaces. Together the music and the lyrics create a compelling journey from pre–breakup unease, to the desolation of her split with long–term partner, artist Matthew Barney, to post–breakup despair and eventual healing.

In an email interview with SOS, Björk calls Vulnicura “my most ‘psychological’ album” and “an Ingmar Bergman album”, harking back to an era when art was expected to challenge and disturb. However, while the content and approach of Vulnicura may recall times past, and the heartbreak theme itself obviously is as old as mankind, the album’s form and manner in which it was made are entirely 21st Century.

Inside Track“I feel like I use different methods for every album,” explains the singer. “I quite like that, both because I think the songs should run the show and I like to be their humble servant, but mostly because I get easily bored. With Vespertine [2001] I recorded all sorts of noises around the house, very quiet ones, and I then magnified them up in Pro Tools, and created rhythms with them. It took me like three years, very enjoyable, but it was like crocheting a huge blanket with a tiny needle. Homogenic [1997] was done very differently. I asked Markus Dravs to make 100 one–bar beats that had distorted ‘Icelandic volcanic’ qualities. I would sit next to him and drum the patterns on the table. Then once I got into the studio with the songs ready I had a library of beats and put them in songs like ‘Jóga’, ‘Bachelorette’ and ‘Five Years’. I would put like beat 34 in the chorus and beat 88 in the verse, or whatever.”

Minimal Tech

Much of the writing and recording of Vulnicura took place at Björk’s New York home, where she has the ultimate 21st Century studio. The total music–tech content consists of an Avid Pro Tools HD Native Thunderbolt system, Genelec 1032 monitors (“I like them a lot, they sound very creamy. But they can be deceptive, because everything sounds good in them. So you have to be a little careful.”), an M–Audio controller, a Telefunken ELAM 251 microphone and Neve 1081 mic preamp.

Björk takes a hands–on role in directing her string players, as here at Syrland Studios during the making of Vulnicura.Björk takes a hands–on role in directing her string players, as here at Syrland Studios during the making of Vulnicura.Photo: James MerryFor Chris Elms’ first string session at Sundlaugin Studio in Reykjavik, a 15–piece string section was miked very close, as shown in this photo.For Chris Elms’ first string session at Sundlaugin Studio in Reykjavik, a 15–piece string section was miked very close, as shown in this photo.“Melody and emotion come first. I will then slowly work on the lyrics. I wrote most of the melodies walking outside, hiking I do that a lot. The melodies whirl in my head, and build up momentum, and then I slowly figure out what kind of shape, structure and mood they need. With this album being what I have called my most ‘psychological’ album, the lyrics were important and strings would support the kind of emotions I had to express.”

Once Björk is clear on the melodies, lyrics, shape and mood of a piece, she will record, edit and comp the vocals in Pro Tools, and in the case of Vulnicura, “work on the string arrangements. I mostly work from my vocal melodies, and I then have the freedom of the computer to arrange.”

She has never really played traditional instruments very much, “which is why I was so excited about the laptop in 1999. I learned to use Sibelius in that year, and most of Vespertine was done on Sibelius — all the music boxes, harps, glockenspiels, and so on. It was the same with ‘Ambergris March’ [from Drawing Restraint 9, a soundtrack album she made in 2005 with Matthew Barney]. With the string arrangements I did on Post [1995], Homogenic and Vespertine, I gradually learned to arrange, but with Vulnicura also to transcribe and conduct when needed. I also started using Pro Tools in 1999 and kinda got hooked. I like that it isn’t on a 4/4 grid, and I can be more focused on the narration, look at the music from a film perspective, rather than as a ‘house’ club thing. But to be honest, by now you can do all things in all programs, so it is mostly about what you feel comfortable with. At the end of the day, it is about the emotion. As a singer I have also always liked the challenge of not being too hooked on gear. This maybe comes from singing through bass amps in punk bands as a teenager. If you want a certain timbre, make it with your throat!

Inside TrackFurther string sessions took place at Syrland Studios, with a larger ensemble. For an even more intimate sound, all their instruments were miked with clip–on DPA omnis.Further string sessions took place at Syrland Studios, with a larger ensemble. For an even more intimate sound, all their instruments were miked with clip–on DPA omnis.Photo: James Merry“I don’t use samplers much. I will usually gather soundbanks for each album and will then play them in on keyboards. This applies for simpler beats in songs like ‘Venus As A Boy’ [from Debut] and ‘Cosmogony’ [from Biophilia], and so on. I play my string arrangements on the keyboard or in Sibelius, but more and more I am using Melodyne to do complex arrangements with my voice. I will then copy those arrangements over to the strings.”

Enter Arca

For the first two thirds of 2013, Björk worked alone with her musical material, both in New York and in Reykjavik. Given the heavy subject matter, it was a daunting task. But, she explains on her web site, “then a magic thing happened to me: as I lost one thing something else entered. Alejandro

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Secrets Of The Mix Engineers: Patrick Leonard & Jesse E String

The Leonards: Patrick Leonard (left) and Leonard Cohen at work in the latter’s house.The Leonards: Patrick Leonard (left) and Leonard Cohen at work in the latter’s house.

In search of reality, Leonard Cohen convinced his producer Patrick Leonard to abandon his hang-ups about using sampled instruments.

Paul Tingen

“I’m slowing down the tune, I’ve never liked it fast / You want to get there soon, I want to get there last,” croons Leonard Cohen on ‘Slow’, the funny and catchy opening track of his latest album, Popular Problems. It’s ironic, in this context, that the Canadian chose Patrick Leonard as his main collaborator, which resulted in songs coming together, according to Cohen in a recent interview, at “shockingly alarming speed”. Patrick Leonard co-wrote seven of the album’s songs with Cohen, and produced all nine. ‘Slow’ was written and recorded at his log cabin home studio in the mountains north of Los Angeles.

“‘Slow’ was the first song we wrote together for this album. Leonard sent me the lyric via email, and I printed it out, sat down at the piano, and took half an hour to write the song — noting the music on the lyrics sheet — and then to record a demo in Logic. I sent the demo to him via email, and he immediately wrote back, saying ‘Great!’ And it was done. Next song. That’s how it went.

“The demo had my guide vocal, a kick drum, a bass, organ and Fender Rhodes, and it occurred to me to also add sampled horns. Later on I went to Leonard’s place to record his vocals, we added female background vocals at my place, and finally we mixed the song, and that was it.”

Inside The Obvious

Despite its swift gestation, ‘Slow’ is an extraordinary piece of work, with a powerful atmosphere and the kind of effortless and graceful melody that one imagines Leonard uncovered rather than wrote. “With [Cohen’s previous album] Old Ideas,” says Patrick Leonard, “I was still trying to get to know Leonard and to inject my own perspective on things. With this new project the nature of our relationship was a little different, and I felt freer to do what I felt worked best, and to just do what I love. In working with Leonard, it was very demanding to come up with things that were simple and yet intelligent. It was hard to maintain a stringent and strict set of rules, and my main rule was that I could not do anything that would make the music more important than the lyrics. It was pretty difficult to make music that matters, and yet does not draw attention to itself, that is utilitarian, yet also is meaningful and purposeful. There were just a few places on the album where I did things you wouldn’t expect, where there were those weird twists that I tend to look for, because they make me happy. During my career I have tended to look for those unexpected things, instead of going for, say, the obvious chord. But lately and particularly in working with Leonard, I have more often gone for the obvious, which means that you need to look inside of the obvious to find meaning and authenticity.

Much of the music on Popular Problems was composed by Patrick Leonard using a Mac laptop and sample libraries running in Logic, and in many cases these virtual instrument tracks survived into the final mixes. Much of the music on Popular Problems was composed by Patrick Leonard using a Mac laptop and sample libraries running in Logic, and in many cases these virtual instrument tracks survived into the final mixes. “There was no technical sophistication in the way this was done. None. Zero. With Old Ideas I worked mostly at Leonard’s studio, which is upstairs in a guest house on his property. I wrote most of the material for the new album at my place, where I have all my keyboards, some nice preamps, like Neve 1073s and 1076s and APIs, some vintage outboard like an LA2A, Urei 1176s, Pultecs and so on, and Logic and Pro Tools HD systems. The studio is in my living room, and acoustically treated with [ASC] Tube Trap wall units. I also have a big garage that is soundproofed and has tie-lines and is where I record drums. At Leonard’s place I used my Neumann U47, a Vintech Audio preamp, which is a Neve 1073 clone, an Apogee Duet, a Mac with Logic 9, a set of AKG headphones, Genelec speakers, a Nord Stage and an 88-key Akai controller. The latter plays terribly, but it forced me to play in a way that worked for the album. Leonard also has this Technics keyboard, and we set up like anybody would in a garage.

“In all fairness, while I may describe my setup as not sophisticated, in reality a quad-core laptop slammed full of RAM, with terabyte hard drives and huge sound libraries going back 20 years and linked to great sample players, is hardly a small tool. It actually is a very powerful tool, and more than I could have imagined having at many other points in my career! I still use Logic 9, by the way, because I had some words with Apple over the direction they took with X, particularly when they showed me that they had put in things like ‘male vocal chain’, which had compression, EQ and reverb preset. I was like, ‘How can you possibly do this?’ How can anyone know what it will be used for and, second, why take away people’s option to learn how compressors work, and to experiment with them?’ It’s often the errors that people make that are the most interesting.”

Climbing Mount Cohen

“Writing the music to Leonard’s lyrics was a matter of contemplating and meditating on what it wants to be. Once you know what it wants to be, you can just do it. With some of these songs I was driving back to my house, and my phone would ring and there would be a new lyric. I would be reading it while driving, because it was impossible not to, and by the time I got home, I would know what to do, and I’d record it and send it to him. Sometimes he’d give me feedback, and say, ‘It’s not like that,’ and I would do another one, and that would be the one. Or there would be more versions. In some cases we didn’t make it, and we’re still working on these songs. We spent a lot of time at Leonard’s house trying ideas and putting them down, and trying to figure out the songs that are tough. ‘A Street’, for example, was a production challenge for me. It was written by Leonard and Anjani Thomas many years ago, and Leonard and I considerably reshaped it. I changed the feel to a blues shuffle and the structure by adding an interlude and putting the chorus chords at the end.

“The main two mountains we climbed with this record were ‘Born In Chains’ and ‘Nevermind’. To really find the centre of them was just luck. You can only do so many songs like that on a single project. The ones that aren’t that hard are still a lot of work, and the ones that are hard really take it out of you. Leonard wrote ‘Born In Chains’ many years ago and has spent a lot of time working on it. It was a real challenge to figure it out. We recorded a version of the song for Old Ideas, but we never got it. On this record we got it, but only barely. I wrote the song ‘Nevermind’ probably 10 times. I did all kinds of versions trying to get it right. I love that lyric! Finally, one day we were at his house, and I put up that quarter-note bass drum and a Fender Rhodes sound, and started playing that riff, and Leonard had his headphones on and did his thing, and it went straight down. We just improvised it. I added the other sampled parts — the strings, the organ, the djembe — immediately afterwards, in the moment. The main riff was played by me on a Fender Rhodes. The Middle-Eastern-sounding female vocal sample in the song comes from the EastWest Voices Of Passion sample collection. It was the first key I played, and Leonard liked it, so I just left it. It uses a different scale than the rest of the music, so isn’t quite harmonically right, but it somehow was OK, because the key centre is the same.

What’s Real

After Leonard had written the music for Popular Problems, in most cases at his log-cabin studio, and had recorded Cohen’s vocals at the poet and singer’s home studio, the producer brought the sessions back to his log cabin, where he and engineer Jesse E String overdubbed drums, bass, guitar and backing vocals.

Jesse E String and bassist Joe Ayoub at work in Patrick Leonard’s log-cabin studio in the mountains north of LA.Jesse E String and bassist Joe Ayoub at work in Patrick Leonard’s log-cabin studio in the mountains north of LA.“We’d accumulate several songs, and Leonard would learn to sing them,” Leonard elaborates, “and I then went over to his house where we’d sit for an afternoon. He’d do 10 takes of each song, and I’d take them back home, where Jesse and I would comp the vocals for each song. After that we invited the musicians in. Drummer Brian McLeod and bassist Joe Ayoub played on ‘Slow’, and James Harrah even played a guitar part, but we all listened to it, and concluded: ‘You know what, the demo that was done in half an hour sounds and feels better.’ Better is a qualitative judgement of course, because things are always better for a certain purpose. The curtains in this room are red, because that colour works well in this room. That does not mean that red is better than blue! And so my demo backing was a better fit for Leonard’s lyrics and vocals.

“Brian is one of the world’s best drummers, and there was an occasion when he had just replaced my sample drum part, and just as he came back in the studio Jesse and I had switched back to the sample part, for comparison. When Brian came in he said, ‘Oh, that sounds good,’ thinking it was him playing. When you can fool a great drummer into thinking that it’s him playing, that’s good enough for me! The fact that Brian plays a snare drum that has seen service during World War 1, all of these things that I used to get so hung up on, none of that matters any more. If a sound really fills the space and does what it is supposed to do, who cares where it came from?”

Drastically Different Demos

Jesse E String (his real name, and he’s primarily a cellist, not a guitarist) has worked with Patrick Leonard since 2006, when he was a runner at Henson Recording Studios in LA, where Leonard had a recording space. String went freelance after Leonard left Henson in 2010, and he’s since worked on a wide variety of projects, being on call whenever Leonard needs him. During this past year String’s main preoccupations were recording Nick Jonas’s eponymously titled solo album and Popular Problems — “I don’t think you can get further apart in the musical spectrum,” he muses.

Jesse E String at Henson Studios in LA.Jesse E String at Henson Studios in LA.Photo: Jeff SteinbergString also has an engineering credit on Old Ideas, but adds that he “didn’t do much on that record, just some vocal comps with Pat[rick]. Leonard didn’t want many outside people, and Ed Sanders mixed most of the songs, while Pat mixed his own songs in Logic. I think Ed and Pat mixed one of Pat’s songs together. Leonard often falls in love with the demos that Pat makes in Logic and so they were used for the final versions. With Popular Problems Leonard gave Pat a lot more space to do what he does, and while there were very few real musicians on Old Ideas, we fleshed out almost all the songs on Popular Problems with a band. On some songs this didn’t work, like on ‘Slow’, because Pat’s demo actually sounded better than the versions we did with the live musicians. Because Leonard likes Pat’s demos so much, when Brian and Joe came in to play drums and bass they generally tried to play the parts that Pat had written, almost note for note. We also were sonically trying to match their sounds to the demo, because if it sounded drastically different Leonard would ask: ‘What happened?’ But on the song ‘Samson In New Orleans’ Brian and Joe significantly changed the feel of the rhythm section and played in more places than Pat had done. Leonard loved it, which was great for us, because it gave Pat and I the feeling that we had more of a free rein in using the live musicians.”

47 Varieties

One challenge for Jesse E String was getting the most comfortable vocal performance from Cohen. “The microphone changed, because Pat started off using his [Neumann] U47, which he had used for Leonard’s vocals on Old Ideas as well. Pat’s 47 is one of the best mics I have ever heard, it’s amazing! But during the recordings for Popular Problems Leonard started getting uncomfortable with the mic, and said he wanted a handheld mic, so Pat recorded Leonard’s vocals for ‘Born In Chains’ with a Shure SM58. If you listen you can hear it’s a different mic. I then suggested to Pat that Leonard use a Neumann KMS105, which is a really nice handheld mic, and Leonard did a few songs with that, which was a vast improvement. Eventually Patrick worked out that Leonard actually preferred to sit while singing, and then they went back to using the 47. I recorded Leonard’s vocals on ‘Almost Like The Blues’ and ‘Did I Ever Love You’ at Ed’s place, using Pat’s 47 and an AMS/Neve 500-series mic pre. I did not use compression, and I don’t think Pat did either for the vocals recorded at Leonard’s place.

This composite screen capture shows the minimalist Pro Tools session for ‘Slow’.This composite screen capture shows the minimalist Pro Tools session for ‘Slow’.“So there was a bit of a merry-go-round with Leonard’s vocal mic, and we had a bit of the same with Logic and Pro Tools, because while I know my way around Logic, I prefer to work in Pro Tools. When Pat came back from Leonard’s place for the vocal comp I’d mix the music to two tracks and I’d export that and Leonard’s vocal takes to Pro Tools. After Pat and I had comped the vocals, I consolidated everything, and I’d then transfer the vocal comp back to the original Logic session, so Pat could show it to Leonard, and could also still make changes to the music if he wanted. There were some songs on which we recorded bass and drums before Leonard had laid down his vocals, and these were bounced to Logic so Pat could record Leonard over them. Conversely, before I recorded anyone on Pat’s demos, I always bounced the tracks from Logic to Pro Tools. So there was a slow migration from Logic to Pro Tools. Everything was in 44.1kHz/24-bit, because that’s what Pat was using in Logic.

‘Samson In New Orleans’ was, by contrast with ‘Slow’, a slightly busier mix, thanks to the addition of ‘real’ instruments. Five master bus tracks have been removed from this shot for space reasons.‘Samson In New Orleans’ was, by contrast with ‘Slow’, a slightly busier mix, thanks to the addition of ‘real’ instruments. Five master bus tracks have been removed from this shot for space reasons.“We did a rhythm-section recording session with Brian and Joe together, which was the extent of people actually playing together on this album. We also did sessions with Brian and Joe separately. My recording chains couldn’t be simpler. On the drums I had a Sennheiser MD421 on the kick, an AKG C414 on the snare, a Shure SM7 on the ride, a Shure SM57 on the hi-hat, and two B&K 411’s in the room for ambience. I ran all these mics through several of Pat’s Neve 1073s and then straight into his Pro Tools HD system. There was no processing apart from a little bit of EQ on the 1073s. I had a Neumann M149 on Joe’s double bass, going into a Neve 1073, with some surgical EQ ducking in the 300-400Hz range, and I ran it through Pat’s LA2A. For the acoustic guitar I used a Neumann KM84, and the electric guitar cabinet was recorded with an MD421, and both went through a 1073 and an 1176. The background vocals were recorded with Pat’s Telefunken ELAM 251, going through a 1073 and then an LA2A. The violin was recorded later, at Ed’s studio, with a Flea 49 mic and going through an API mic pre and straight into Pro Tools. For me the signal chains start before the microphones, and Alex’s violin tone was superb and the recorded sound one of the best I’ve ever tracked. The engineering on this record really matched the minimalist approach of the production. It was all very clean.”

Record Fast, Mix Slow

After a lightning-fast writing process and a more steady overdubbing stage, Leonard and String arrived at Ed Sanders’ studio for a drawn-out process of mixing and adding further recordings. This took from June 11 to July 22 this year, with Sanders also present to provide a listening ear and general support. Leonard recalls, “Ed’s studio is in downtown LA, which was convenient for Leonard. He’s also familiar with the space, so we ended up there and it worked really well. The mixing went on for quite a while because we started making small musical additions and changes, and because we decided to leave some songs off, I wrote an additional song, ‘Almost Like The Blues’. Leonard sent me the lyric, and I did one version, which he didn’t like, so I did another, and that is what you hear on the album. I wrote that sitting at a kitchen table with a laptop and headphones! Leonard overdubbed his vocal at Ed’s place, and he also re-sang his vocal to ‘Did I Ever Love You’, and we added the violin and some more backing vocals. Rather than describing this as a mixing phase it’s more correct to say that we finished the album there.”

“I’ve never understood the current situation,” adds String, “in which people finish their recording project and then send it over to one of the many boutique mixers to mix it. I can see the benefit of someone coming in with fresh ears towards the end of a project, but for me the mixing stage is still very strongly also a production stage. I’ve never thought, ‘Now we just mix it and it’s done.’ It is during mixing that the tracks come really alive and at that point you gain new perspectives and you often want to change things, like record a new vocal or instrument. It has always been like that in working with Patrick, where mixing is in fact the last stage of production. It’s not only a final polishing stage. The way Pat and I work is that we are always constantly mixing while we record, and during the mixing stage we figure out how everything works. I would say that when we start to mix, we’re not really ready to mix in the traditional sense. We’re ready to decide what works and what doesn’t work. It’s a continuous process, and for this reason there isn’t a set mix routine.

“In doing Popular Problems, we were switching between songs all the time, so the ability to recall was crucial, otherwise it would have been a nightmare. I was mixing through Ed’s Harrison desk, but only used it for analogue summing. The Pro Tools session came up on nine or 10 faders on the board, and from there the stereo mix went back into the session. The only mix routine we had was that I’d say, ‘Give me a couple of hours with this,’ and I would pull up the session, and I’d take it to where I thought it sounded good. It wouldn’t take too long, because none of the sessions had many tracks. I’d then get feedback, first from Pat and Ed, and later from Leonard. He would either say, ‘You missed it, it’s not on the mark,’ or ‘There are a couple of issues,’ or ‘Perfect, don’t touch it.’ But if the latter was the case, we still went back and touched it. I don’t think there was one mix to which we didn’t return to tweak more things at a later stage. We agonised over every mix.”

The Music Comes Second

“The bottom line with this record is that it is all about Leonard’s voice, and we didn’t want anything to distract from that. Leonard once told Pat, ‘You know what I love about those old 45s? There was the singer, and then there was all this stuff behind them.’ That kind of became our mantra during the mixing stage. If you listen to the end result, it’s like that: it’s Leonard and all the stuff behind him. With Leonard’s vocal so far up-front, we didn’t need much compression on the music to make sure things fit in a dynamic range. The drums were never going to be rock & roll in-your-face. We went for a very natural sound, and we let the transients fly. With a rock or pop track, you start with the drums, and then you add the bass, and then you work your way up from there. This was not like that at all. It was a matter of getting the vocal loud and then push up all the stuff behind it. I would start with Leonard’s vocals, and I’d then add the other tracks one by one.

One of the biggest challenges in mixing Popular Problems was keeping low-end instruments out of the way of Leonard Cohen’s voice. That resulted in EQ settings like this, from the bass on ‘Samson In New Orleans’.One of the biggest challenges in mixing Popular Problems was keeping low-end instruments out of the way of Leonard Cohen’s voice. That resulted in EQ settings like this, from the bass on ‘Samson In New Orleans’.“It was never a struggle for me to balance Leonard’s voice against the music, because I was cutting so much low end out of the bass. The low end would have been too big otherwise. We were going for a bass reminiscent of John Paul Jones in Led Zeppelin, a Precision bass that’s much more in the lower mid-range. Modern records have this huge low end, and we wanted to stay away from that. The only thing that was a bit of a struggle with Leonard’s voice was the setting of the high-pass filter. Normally setting that on a vocal is not a big deal: you set it to 100Hz to take the room and extraneous noises made by the singer out and that’s it. But on Leonard’s voice we needed to be really precise — 5Hz lower or higher made a real difference. This was the only record I’ve ever worked on where the high-pass was a key element of the vocal sound. Leonard sings so softly that there are loads of ambient noises, and so close to the microphone that there’s a huge proximity effect. Without the high-pass filter we would have blown out everyone’s subwoofers. For most songs the high-pass filter on his voice was in the region of 75Hz, and on ‘Samson In New Orleans’ it was set as low as 54Hz!”

‘Slow’

‘Slow’ is a tiny session by modern standards, with just six stereo music tracks — kick, Motown bass, three keyboard parts, a horn section part — and three mono vocal tracks: Cohen’s and two backing vocals. In addition there’s a click track at the top of the session, two reverb aux tracks, five master tracks (drums, bass, keys, backing vocals and effects), and one mixdown track. This adds up to a grand total of 18 tracks, with just 11 plug-ins on them. In Cohen’s universe, it’s not only slowly that does it, but also simply.

As the most important element in the mixes, Cohen’s voice was the only one that went through an analogue treatment chain, and proved so challenging that String and Leonard had to call in the mix emergency services right at the end of the project in the shape of studio legend Bill Bottrell, who spent a day fine-tuning mostly the vocals.

“I had Leonard’s vocal track coming up on one channel on the desk,” says String, “and ran it through a Dbx 160X compressor and a Mercury EQH1 EQ, which is very nice and well-built. We initially tried Ed’s Bricasti for reverb on his vocals and the backing vocals, but we eventually favoured the Altiverb ‘Wendy Carlos plate’. The ‘Room’ aux reverb had the Altiverb room plate, from Cello Studio A, which I used on the keyboard and horn tracks. The FabFilter Pro-Q is my favourite plug-in EQ, and I used that on the kick, the bass, and all the keyboard tracks. One of the challenges with this mix was the kick level, which started bothering Leonard at some point, because he felt it was stepping on his vocal. In the end the kick sounds like a pillow being hit, because we rolled off everything below 75Hz and everything above 1k. It looks pretty funny in the screenshot! Wherever the high-pass on Leonard’s voice was set determined where the kick was going to be. There’s an empty Fender Rhodes track, because I sent the sampled Rhodes out to an amp and reprinted it. The horns have the McDSP Analogue Channel, because the track was sounding a bit too synthy to me, and I wanted to warm it up a bit. It saturates the sound in a nice way. Finally, I had the McDSP Compressor Bank on the backing vocals to keep them in place.”

‘Samson In New Orleans’

‘Samson In New Orleans’ is one of the five tracks with live musician overdubs on Popular Problems: in this case bass, drums and violin. For this reason the session is larger than that of ‘Slow’, but it’s still a modest 25 audio tracks plus three aux tracks, five master tracks, and finally the mixdown track, totalling 34 tracks in total. The audio tracks break down into five live drum tracks, three programmed drum tracks, a bass, sampled French horns and trombones, the live violin track, Leonard’s electric piano, Cohen’s vocal track and 11 backing vocal tracks, while the three aux tracks are all reverbs.

Inside TrackString explains: “This was one of the easiest tracks to mix. It was the one out of all of them where Leonard said it was incredible. His compliment was so good that it left me ecstatic for the entire weekend afterwards! But other than that this mix isn’t that different from the others. Once again, there aren’t many plug-ins: mixing was much more a subtractive process than anything else. Everything sounded great the way it was recorded, so basically we had to judge whether anything got in the way of the vocal, and if it did, make adjustments. But there never was any high-level processing. I had compression from the Compressor Bank on the backing vocals and also on the upright bass, in fact quite a bit on the latter, because it has so little sustain, and I squashed it to give it a more consistent tone. The rest was subtractive EQ and reverb.

“The drums have the Waves Renaissance EQ, because you can’t run native plug-ins in Pro Tools when you’re recording, and I only had the native version of the Pro-Q, so I used the REQ instead. It’s our input EQ. I didn’t have a problem with how it sounded afterwards, so I left it. The violin has some Avid 7-band EQ, which is there for the same reason that I had the Renaissance EQ on the drums. It’s just a high-pass and it does a slight dip of 2.2dB at 1kHz, and that’s it. The Compressor Bank on the violin does not go past 3dB, it’s very subtle. The green track is the electric piano, which I ran re-amped, to give it a bit more air. Leonard’s vocals would have had the same signal chain as on ‘Slow’, with the Dbx 160X and the Mercury EQ1H, and a Pro-Q. I also gated all Leonard’s vocals, so that the track ducked the moment he stopped singing, to get rid of extraneous noises. The funniest example of that is at the end of the very last line he sings on the last song on the album, ‘You Got Me Singing’, where you can hear the sound of a dog barking in the background, from across the street. It was in time and in tune, so we left it! We did Charlean Carmon’s chorus vocals in three parts, left and right and centre, and I used an Altiverb reverb with a 20-second decay for a cool, washed-out and otherworldly effect. It was one of the few times we didn’t do something that was plain and simple.”

The Third Master

Eagle-eyed perusers of the screenshots will, however, have noticed the absence of plug-ins on Leonard’s vocals and the Plate 140 aux track in both sessions. Apparently this was the result of Bill Bottrell’s last-minute mix tweaks. String explains: “What happened was that we had done all the mixes, running them back into Pro Tools through Pat’s Neve 2254, and we went for a first mastering session, and we were very pleased with the result. When you listened to each song individually, they each sounded fantastic. But Leonard was the first to notice that when you listened to them all together, the vocal levels were jumping a little. We realised that we had to re-examine where the vocal had to sit on the album as a whole. Because the vocal was so loud in comparison to the music, the issue hadn’t really come to light.

“After we had spent a day resetting the levels and making sure that all the vocal levels and the relationships between the vocals and the music were the same, we went back for another mastering session, with Stephen Marcussen. We felt that it sounded much better, but Leonard said that it still wasn’t quite right. I think he felt that his vocal sound was a little in peril. At this stage Pat called in the Big Gun, Bill Bottrell, who is one of my all-time idols, so I was more than happy for him to come in.”

Bill Bottrell is a living legend of the American music industry, who has worked with Michael Jackson, ELO, Madonna, Sheryl Crow and many more, but now lives in semi-retirement in Northern California. Bottrell added another 40 years of recording experience to the Leonards’ combined 91, and in so doing he helped them get close to perfection in realising their purpose. “Bill basically left the music tracks the same, and treated Leonard’s vocal slightly differently,” continues String. “We had realised that Leonard loves the sound of his vocal through an old limiter called a Western Electric, which looks like something you hook up to a car. We had tried it during the mixing stage, but Pat and I weren’t too keen on it. But Bill sent Leonard’s vocal through the Western Electric, did some EQ’ing, and the other main thing he did was change the reverb on Leonard’s vocal to a Universal Audio EMT 140 plate plug-in. He also used reverb a bit more generously than we had done. Right from the moment when Bill was making these changes, Leonard was really happy.”

Patrick Leonard concludes: “You could say that we lost our objectivity a bit at the end of what had been a five-month-long process. I don’t think there’s anyone I trust more than Bill, he’s the greatest, and he went through all the songs in one day and that was enough. After this Leonard was entirely happy, and we went back for a third mastering session with Stephen, and we were done.”

“I never liked it fast, with me it’s got to last,” sings Cohen in ‘Slow’. In Popular Problems, the Leonards, with help from String, have created an album that is sure to do the latter. .

The Other Leonard

The coincidence of the two main protagonists on Popular Problems sharing a name is the subject of good humour between Leonard Cohen and Patrick Leonard. The latter recalls one such instance. “I was driving to Leonard’s studio one day when I passed a white truck that had ‘The Leonards’ written on its side, and nothing else, so I had no idea what business they were in. When I got to Leonard’s house we were joking about it, and we had the idea of billing ourselves as ‘The Leonards: 100 years of recorded music.’ Because between the two of us, we have 100 years of experience in recording! When we work together, what we are really doing is trying to distil that experience as best as we can, and be as economical as possible in writing, performing, and production. Leonard comes up with phrases that will go through you like a screaming army. I aspire to that, but I know I don’t have in me what he has. What I can do is distil all my knowledge of music into a single drop, with each note being the right one.”

A pedant might point out that the Leonards ‘only’ have 91 years of recorded music between them: Cohen’s debut album, Songs Of Leonard Cohen, was recorded and released in 1967, and Patrick Leonard’s recording career started in 1970, when he played, at the tender age of 14, on a long-forgotten album by an obscure Chicago band produced by Larry Carlton. Ninety-one years in recording studios is impressive by any standard, and the shared experience and talent that the Leonards distilled into Popular Problems has contributed to the album topping the charts in many countries around the world and receiving countless rave reviews.

Originally from a sparsely populated peninsula north of Lake Michigan, Patrick Leonard came to prominence in 1984 when he was invited to play keyboards on the Jacksons’ Victory tour. His talents were so evident that he was quickly promoted to the tour’s musical director. Madonna subsequently headhunted him as musical director on her 1985 Virgin tour, leading to an extraordinarily fruitful collaboration which saw Leonard co-write many of the pop star’s classic songs on albums like True Blue (1986), Like A Prayer (1989) and Ray Of Light (1998). He would go on to work with luminaries like Bryan Ferry, Rod Stewart, Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, Elton John, and Bon Jovi.

It’s a heavy-duty list of credits by any standard, but during the last 10 years Leonard has gradually withdrawn from high-profile mainstream work, because of changes in the way the music industry works, with record companies increasingly taking control of artists’ artistic directions. “I can’t do things I don’t like. I would rather drive a Toyota for the rest of my life,” comments Leonard. He remained busy composing and working on independent musical theatre, film and general story ideas, but a few years ago he was coaxed by Leonard Cohen’s son Adam into producing the latter’s 2012 album Like A Man. The younger Cohen was eager for Patrick Leonard to work with his father, so the older duo collaborated on four songs on Cohen’s 2012 album Old Ideas and two years later on the whole of Popular Problems.

Samples: It Doesn’t Matter What People Think

“The vocal sample in ‘Nevermind’ is one of those things that I would never have been able to accept in my younger years without first going into a screaming hissy fit,” says Patrick Leonard. “Here is what I have come to, and it may sound crazy, but I am going to stand by it: I’ve come to a place where I don’t care any more whether people think something is a sample, or not. It’s kind of embarrassing, because if you look at my studio, you’ll see an old Steinway B, a Yamaha CX7, a beautiful Fender Rhodes, a great Wurlitzer, a great Hammond B3, a Prophet 5, a Minimoog, all the badass keyboards you can think of. And yet on this record I used none of them! The keyboards, strings and horns, and also the drums and bass in four songs, are all samples. The organ is a Native Instruments B3 sample, the electric piano a MOTU Mach V sample, and so on.

“This is in part the result of something Leonard said to me when working on Old Ideas. I was writing a cello part and playing it with a sample, and I said to Leonard: ‘This will sound great when it is played on a real instrument.’ And Leonard replied, ‘I have news for you, because what you’re playing is real instrument. You push a key, and a sound comes out. That’s an instrument.’

“On this album we had a violinist come in to play on a few songs, and I’m glad we did, because it does sound better than the sampled violin. But Leonard pointed out that my performance in some cases was better, not because it sounded more like an actual violin, but because of the feel. So I now think that musicality is what’s most important, and I am much more focused on that.

“Of course it depends on the context, but if I had used a real B3 on this album and had insisted on ‘real’ musicians, and we’d spent a lot of time getting the performances really right, I’m not sure it would have made a better album. And so the backing of four of the songs on the album is just me playing all the parts. The one thing I have to say about it is that there are no loops in any of the songs. All my parts were played through from top to bottom. My drums are from Toontrack Superior Drummer, and I might mess with the samples a bit, changing the ambience or the pitch, pressing whatever button I can find. After that I’d play them on the keyboard, from the beginning to the end of the song, and might quantise 40 percent or so not to make it too stiff, and that’s the drum part done. For the bass sounds I often used the Virtual Ensemble’s Trilogy ‘soul bass’ sample.”

The blurring of the lines between real and sampled instruments reached its logical conclusion on another of Leonard’s recent projects: “I’m currently working with Iris Hond, a Dutch concert pianist, on a newly composed ‘classical’ music project, and we wrote these demos using Vienna string samples and the piano at her home, and some voice samples. We then recorded a version of that at EastWest Studios in LA, with a 25-piece orchestra, a brand-new concert grand piano tweaked by one of the best piano techs in the world, and a wonderful singer doing all the voices. Afterwards we were listening to this, and could not tell the difference between the two recordings!”

Leonard is, however, careful to point out that the shift away from traditional instruments does not invalidate the need for musicality on behalf of the performer. “You simply don’t want to hear me talk about what technology has done to the level of music and musicianship and performance, because it is really depressing. There is no up side. It’s not just that things have gone backwards, we have never been in a position where there is such a global reach for so much garbage! The counter-argument is that it’s great that there’s so much music available for everyone, but there just aren’t 100,000, or whatever the number is, supremely gifted people around. There just aren’t!”

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Article Preview :: Inside Track: Secrets Of A Mix Engineer

People + Opinion : Artists / Engineers / Producers / Programmers

Bob Dylan’s album of Sinatra covers is an unlikely triumph. So good, in fact, that it didn’t need mixing!

Paul Tingen

The news that Bob Dylan was set to release an album of Frank Sinatra covers left many people scratching their heads. Dylan’s gritty, nasal voice has always been the antithesis of Sinatra’s mellifluous crooning, and over the last couple of decades, has deteriorated to the point where it’s at times little more than a tuneless rasp. To tackle 10 classics of the Great American Songbook armed only with this weapon seemed a bridge too far, and many feared the worst.

However, as so often happened during his long and chequered career, Shadows In The Night confounded expectations. Perhaps because he’s singing more softly and not straining his voice, the 73–year old Dylan manages to hold the often elaborate tunes quite beautifully, and the fragile and wavering quality of his singing only adds to the poignancy of the songs. “It shouldn’t work,” wrote one critic, “but Shadows In The Night is quite gorgeous.”

Uncover Versions

The surprising depth and quality of Dylan’s vocals is only one of several factors that make Shadows In The Night such a distinctive artistic success. Another is the minimalist and sensitive arrangements, played by Dylan’s live band, with the occasional addition of some understated horns — there are none of the orchestral or big–band arrangements that were the essence of Sinatra’s approach. Many reviewers also noted the compelling general ambience and “amazing” sound of the album. This stemmed from Dylan and his band being recorded in a straightforward, old–fashioned manner, resulting in a sonic warmth and intimacy that perfectly complements the late–night melancholy of the songs and performances.

“I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time,” wrote the singer, “but was never brave enough to approach 30–piece complicated arrangements and refine them down for a five–piece band. That’s the key to all these performances. We knew these songs extremely well. It was all done live. Maybe one or two takes. No overdubbing. No vocal booths. No headphones. No separate tracking, and, for the most part, mixed as it was recorded. I don’t see myself as covering these songs in any way. They’ve been covered enough. Buried, as a matter a fact. What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day.”

Al Schmitt, teaching a masterclass at Mix With The Masters.Al Schmitt, teaching a masterclass at Mix With The Masters.Inside TrackIn other words, while Dylan’s musical approach was very different to Sinatra’s, the recording process for Shadows In The Night was very much of a piece with the way records were done in the ’50s. And if you intend to record in that way, who best to call than someone who was actually there at the time, and who even worked with Sinatra? Enter Al Schmitt, most likely the recording engineer with the longest career of any still active.

Harry’s Game

Schmitt first set foot in a recording studio during World War Two when, as a young boy, he assisted his uncle Harry Smith at Harry Smith Recording in Manhattan. He has since gone on to become the most venerated engineer and mixer in the history of music, with a record–breaking 23 Grammy Awards to his name, and a set of credits that could easily fill a book, including legendary names like Henry Mancini, Sam Cooke, Jefferson Airplane, Barbra Streisand, Steely Dan, George Benson, Toto, Miles Davis, Natalie Cole, Diana Ross, Elvis Costello, Luther Vandross, Neil Young, Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney and many, many others.

Surprisingly, however, Schmitt had never worked with Dylan before the call came from the singer’s manager, Jeff Rosen. “Unfortunately, I was busy at the time they had planned,” remembers Schmitt, on the phone from his Los Angeles home. “I was really disappointed, because Dylan was still on the bucket list of artists I’d love to work with, but never had. The very next day I got a call back, saying that they were prepared to move their schedule to a time when I was available, because Bob really wanted to work with me. Evidently he’d heard my work, including the Duets [1993] album I had recorded with Sinatra, and he must
Published in SOS May 2015

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Lily Allen: 'The Fear' — It’s Not Me, It’s You

Looking for a follow‑up to her smash-hit debut album, Lily Allen ditched her many other collaborators to work with LA‑based producer and musician Greg Kurstin.

Paul Tingen

Secrets Of The Mix Engineers: Greg Kurstin

Lily Allen's second album, 'It's Not Me, It's You', was released in February this year. Whereas her first album featured a long list of musicians, co‑writers, producers and engineers, there are only two production and writing credits here: Allen herself and Greg Kurstin. The two co‑wrote all songs on the album and Kurstin played all instruments, and engineered and produced. Mark 'Spike' Stent mixed the album's opening track, 'Everyone's At It', but Kurstin mixed the rest, including the album's first single, 'The Fear', which spent four weeks at the top of the UK hit parade and reached the top 10 in more than half a dozen other nations. The album, meanwhile, was a UK, Australian, and Canadian number one, and reached number five in the US.

Secrets Of The Mix Engineers: Greg KurstinGreg Kurstin was one of the many credits on Allen's first album, and has also written and produced tracks for Kylie Minogue, Britney Spears, Peaches, Pink, Natasha Bedingfield and Donna Summer. So it's a surprise to learn that Kurstin's musical roots are in bebop and hard bop rather than pop or rock; and given his success as an engineer and a mixer, it's also striking that he does not have a studio background and eschews the industry standard, Pro Tools, in favour of working entirely in Logic.

"Yes, the jazz influence does seem very far away,” he chuckles. "But I really have to credit jazz music for helping me with songwriting and hearing unusual chord progressions and melodies, and for writing really quickly. In jazz you improvise so much, it's like you're composing on the spot. So when it came to writing songs with Lily, for instance, it was really helpful to be instantly able to hear where things needed to go. My jazz experience helps me to immediately play what I hear in my head, so while I'm in the verse, I may be wondering where to go with the chorus and hear something that's not necessarily in the same key. It's funny, I have always been going back and forth between jazz and pop, and I love building these tracks, even though my production approach does not relate at all to the kind of jazz I play.”

Unusually, Greg Kurstin relied entirely on Logic 8's bundled plug‑ins for his mix of 'The Fear'. This part of the session shows most of the virtual instrument tracks which provided the song's sonic backbone. Unusually, Greg Kurstin relied entirely on Logic 8's bundled plug‑ins for his mix of 'The Fear'. This part of the session shows most of the virtual instrument tracks which provided the song's sonic backbone. Nine years ago Kurstin began using Logic, and his current studio in Los Angeles, which he calls Echo, is based around a top‑of‑the‑range Mac desktop computer with version 8 of the DAW software. "My desktop Mac is an eight‑core Intel with 8GB of memory, and I have Apogee Ensemble for going in and out of the computer, and Brent Averill BAE 1272 and BAE 312A preamps, plus a Universal Audio 1176 compressor. Almost everything I track goes through the 312A, then the 1176 and into the computer. Everything else is done in the box. My master keyboard is a Roland A37, my monitors are the Adam 7s, and I recently acquired an Adam Sub 8 bass speaker. My room has some acoustic treatment, with stuff above my head and in front of me. I also have a large selection of analogue keyboards, organs, Moogs, ARPs. I love these things and I have about everything from the '60s and '70s. I've sampled many of them in Logic's EXS24 sampler, so I have a bunch of unusual and imperfect‑sounding sounds that I can use for writing and arranging.”

A Month In The Country

"For the tracks on the first album, we started at Mayfair Studios in London for one day, and then did the rest at my studio in LA. But we mostly wrote the new album in makeshift studios in rented countryside cottages in England in September 2007 and the beginning of 2008. Basically I'd rented an Apogee Ensemble, a Nord Electro 2 as a MIDI controller, some speakers, a Neve 1073 preamp, an 1176 compressor, a Telecaster and a Fender Precision, and a Neumann U87 mic.

"For the first album I'd brought in fully arranged tracks, over which she'd write her things, but this time round she and I were sitting in a room with me playing chords on the piano, to which Lily would write her vocals. I would play her, say, a verse idea, and once I heard the lyrics, I'd build up the track, which in turn would inspire her, maybe with a chorus, and eventually a finished song emerged. It was a process of continuous going back and forth between the two of us. I also laid down the arrangements for each track the day we wrote it. I like to have a track done by the end of the day, so I don't have to figure out everything later. I like to work as fast as I can; though sometimes this can be tricky, as every now and again a song may really stump me, and it will take a few days to figure out what direction to take it in.

A lot of volume automation was used on Lily Allen's vocal, in part to minimise unwanted ambience from the cottage where it was recorded.A lot of volume automation was used on Lily Allen's vocal, in part to minimise unwanted ambience from the cottage where it was recorded."Playing everything in an arrangement myself is something that gives me a lot of freedom and control. Because I'm writing and recording simultaneously, I often change the sounds as I go. In general I just throw the most radical sounds at a song that I can find, mostly using the Logic EXS24 sampler or the Logic ES2 synthesizer. I don't really use loops very much, but play everything on the keyboards, including the drum parts, using sounds that come from all over: sample libraries, things I've recorded myself, soft‑synth sounds, and so on. Doing the writing and arranging on the same day also allowed me to send the record company the songs as we were writing them. So the tracks were pretty much finished by the time I got back to LA, even though I might still change or add sounds, and the final mixes weren't finished yet.”

"'The Fear' started from the keyboard acoustic guitar intro that opens the song, which uses a patch I had made of a really primitive acoustic guitar sound from an old '80s sample keyboard, the 360 Systems one, which is very rare and very hard to play: it was a very nerdy keyboard purchase! But I love its sounds, and I particularly like its artificial guitar sound. It was one of those situations in which I just sort of started playing a chord progression to inspire Lily, and she liked it and she came up with the verse, and I then played the chords for the chorus with a piano sound. The track emerged from there.

A lengthy chain of plug‑ins was used to process the lead vocal, including Logic's Pitch Correction, Exciter and Tape Delay.A lengthy chain of plug‑ins was used to process the lead vocal, including Logic's Pitch Correction, Exciter and Tape Delay."I normally mix as I go while writing and recording, as opposed to getting the track ready to give it to a mixer, who then will start from square one. If my rough mix sounds good, then the final mix is just a matter of fine‑tuning things; but if I have a problem with my mix and it's not sounding right, I'll pull all the faders down and start over. Usually I'll begin with the kick drum, the snare, the vocal and maybe the bass, and see how they fit, and when they sound good together I'll add some mid‑rangey instruments, like guitar and keyboards, and work these in. In general, I try to focus on some essential elements and try to make them sound as big as I can, and fit the other elements in with that.

"I did the mixes of Lily's record at my studio here in Los Angeles, because my computers run much faster than the Macbook Pro laptop I had in England. It could barely handle the sessions. When I came home I could open up as many plug‑ins as I wanted and wasn't obliged to print the audio for the MIDI tracks, as I had done in some cases in the UK. The other reason is that I could not really get a reliable sound image while working in these cottages. They were too echoey, and I did a lot of work on headphones out there, which is terrible, but it was the only way to hear what was going on.”

No Logic

Secrets Of The Mix Engineers: Greg Kurstin

"Mixing is a lot of trial and error for me, and there's not really a great logic to what I do. The same with how I lay out the session. The tracks are not grouped or named and there's very little colour‑coding. It would be good to have all the drums and all the guitars next to each other, but when recording I just look for the next available track, and I rarely change the order later on. I'm terrible! The other day someone from Apple came round, and when she looked at my Logic session, she kept asking why I did things like this or like that. Because I work so quickly it's really important to keep a workflow going when I'm writing. Especially when working with someone like Lily I have to keep the ball rolling and the inspiration going, and I don't have time to organise anything.

Secrets Of The Mix Engineers: Greg Kurstin"I just open a track, put an idea down quickly, and open the next track, and carry on. So the initial acoustic guitar sample figure that inspired the track is at the top of the session, on track 2, called 'GK nylon guitar'. The audio tracks are often just called 'Audio Recording #...' There's a little bit of organisation in the edit window for 'The Fear' in that the top contains all the MIDI tracks and the bottom the audio tracks. The MIDI parts are named automatically after whatever patch I used, hence names like 'numb', a kick drum, and 'electric banana', a hi‑hat. In general, I don't print the audio of my MIDI tracks, because I find it easier to change a sound than to process it. I may print MIDI in certain cases, like I printed my main MIDI snare when working in the laptop, to save CPU power. Or I'll print things that have a lot of plug‑ins. I'll only print everything as audio when I have to send a session to an outside mixer, like with Spike — I simply exported all the tracks as audio files, which he then imported into Pro Tools.

"Incidentally, I began the Lily Allen project on Logic 7 and finished it on Logic 8. For the most part the transition went OK, although there were a few problems, because for some reason Logic 8 lost a batch of sounds that had come from Garage Band. Luckily I still had them in my laptop, from which I imported them into my desktop Logic 8 session. In addition, I only used Logic plug‑ins on the 'Fear' session. I have some others, like the Abbey Road Brilliance Pack, but in general I feel that the Logic plug‑ins give me everything I need.”

The vocal track was sent to Logic's Vocoder to create the effect of harmonies. The vocal track was sent to Logic's Vocoder to create the effect of harmonies.

"'Numb' [track 15] is my main kick drum. 'Jazz kit' [9] is a ride cymbal, 'real drums' [23] are my cymbals, 'SiD chip' [30] is a little electronicky sound, like from a video game sample bank, and 'burp 1' [31] is claps. These sounds all come from the EXS sampler. With regards to the kick, it was mostly a question of finding the right EQ on that. It's a kick‑drum sound that I use a lot, because it seems to sort of work. I added some EQ at 90Hz and at 3350Hz, just very simple. There's also a compressor, which is working pretty hard, squashing the sound as hard as possible, and a second EQ that adds around 83Hz, to give it some more low end.

"I had a compressor on the snare, with a lot of release to bring up the sustain, while the EQ rolls off a bit around 1560Hz; the Sub Bass adds some low frequencies, while the other EQs aren't doing very much except for level adjustment. It can be a bit tricky with volume automation to turn an individual sound up or down, and one quick solution is to use an EQ or gain plug‑in for that.

"There are quite a few hi‑hats in this song: one from Logic's Ultrabeat drum machine on track 6, 'electric banana' [20], a hi‑hat chorus pattern, 'MPC big hits' [26] is the main hi‑hat used in the song, in more or less a 16th‑note pattern, 'Street 1' [44] is a quarter‑note hi‑hat, and 'Cannonball drums' is a more electronic‑sounding hi‑hat. I think this is part of my style. It's me compensating for not having live drums. When you have one electronic hi‑hat, it can sound very sterile, but when I layer them, the sound becomes more imperfect. All the different hi‑hats kind of glue together, and it's not a very clean sound, but it works. There are a lot of plug‑ins on the MPC hi‑hat: Overdrive, Stereo Delay, Compressor, Flanger, Stereo EQ. Basically I gave it two different delay times on each side, so you get a stereo effect, added some overdrive for distortion, the compressor squashes it hard, the EQ rolls off some bottom and adds some top, and the flanger does what flangers do, adding some movement, and acting almost like a filter.”

Greg Kurstin makes extensive use of very short delays from Logic's Sample Delay plug‑in to make sources sound larger and wider.Greg Kurstin makes extensive use of very short delays from Logic's Sample Delay plug‑in to make sources sound larger and wider.

Bass: Logic EQ, Compressor, Guitar Amp Pro, Bit Crusher, Bass Amp

"The bass was a tricky element to get right in the song. The original bass that I used while writing remains in the chorus. I wasn't entirely happy with it, but I couldn't top it either. It was a keyboard bass from the ES2 soft synth and it had a weird, very subby character about it that was rather muddy. I ended up printing it. Every time I tried to replace it, the track didn't have the same vibe. I didn't add any effects to it, but because it missed some punch, I added something underneath it. It was a last‑minute thing called 'Perfect Bass', an ES2 saw‑wave bass with the highs filtered out. It doubles the kick drum, and it's in the 220Hz range. These two basses worked well together. I also played a Fender Precision, recorded straight into the computer, and you can hear that in the verses. There's no low end, it's more like a guitar sound. I put the Guitar Amp plug‑in on it, to simulate an amp feel, and a compressor, and a Bit Crusher, which added some digital‑like distortion. There's also a 'low‑endy' bass in the verse on track 22; strangely it's called 'Celeste Baby'. That has the Bass Amp plug‑in, compression and two EQs.”

Logic's Guitar Amp Pro plug‑in was used both as an amp simulator and for its spring reverb emulation.Logic's Guitar Amp Pro plug‑in was used both as an amp simulator and for its spring reverb emulation.

"I recorded Lily's voice with the Neuman U87, going through the Neve 1073 and then an 1176. Most of her vocals were recorded in the cottages where we wrote, which is the reason that there's so much volume automation on her vocal track; on 52/53 is the vocal double, which is muted; and 54‑71 are alternate vocal tracks that are also muted. The rooms often had stone walls and were really live and echoey, and every little background sound could be heard, so I had to do a lot of automation between words. Yeah, there are a lot of plug‑ins on the vocal track! I automated the Pitch Correction, occasionally nudging a note that bugged me. It's not there all the time. The EQ adds some top end and takes off some sub frequencies, to clean up the track. The compressor works just like a regular vocal compressor, just keeping the vocal level in check a little bit, but nothing major. I had never ever used the Exciter before, but when I was messing around with the vocal, I liked what it did, even though I'm not entirely sure what, and I left it on. The Tape Delay is just a very subtle delay that I also filtered to make it sound dark. The Gain is there just for level adjustment, and the additional EQ adds yet more top end, and was something I added as a last-minute thing.”

"I also have two buses on the lead vocal, going to the Logic reverb, Space Designer, one of them to a preset called 'Wide Vocals', which adds a little bit more dimension to the vocals, and the other to a preset called 'Bright Vocals', adding some more room, which is more like a slap effect. There are not many reverbs on the vocals, because parts of the rest of the track, like the strings on track 12, have quite a bit of reverb, and I wanted the vocals to stand out a bit more by keeping them dryer. In addition, there's also the Logic Vocoder to the vocal, side‑chained to track 33, 'LoRes Vox,' so that her vocal is triggering it. I then added chords to it. It's barely audible, but gives the sensation of added harmonies. Finally, there are five tracks of backing vocals [92‑96], that have similar effects on them as the lead vocals. There's also bus 5, which also goes to the Space Designer, with a preset called Gold Vocals, which sounds like a very high‑end reverb that brings the vocals out a little more.”

Guitars: Logic Guitar Amp Pro, EQ, Auto Filter

"There are several guitar parts. The first one you hear, from the 360 Systems, is on track 2, and then there's a counterpart to that, which happens a little later. Track 72 is the main acoustic guitar part, which I printed. All acoustic guitars are played on a keyboard, but I also played a real electric guitar, a Telecaster, which is on 75. The initial guitar on track 2 has a Guitar Amp Pro plug‑in to simulate the character of a guitar amplifier, and a sample delay, which I use a bit like a surround plug‑in. Using very short delay times of just a few milliseconds tricks your ears into thinking that the guitar is larger than it is. I use that plug‑in a lot. Track 72 also has the Guitar Amp Pro plug‑in, here used for the spring delay setting. I love spring reverbs, and I often use the Guitar Amp Pro for that. The first EQ plug‑in on 72 just rolls off some of the sub frequencies that were muddying the sound up a bit; the next EQ is pretty extreme, adding a lot of top around 9.7kHz and rolling of more of the bottom. The Auto Filter just took off some of the very high top end, filtering out some of the noise that I was getting. The rest of the EQs were added during mixing, just giving a bit of brightness. The Telecaster again has the Guitar Amp Pro plug‑in, to simulate an amp sound, and some compression to keep the level steady, and a couple of delays.”

"The main keyboards are the '360 Piano' [track 16], the '360 clav' [10], both from the 360 Systems keyboard, the 'bass lil fuzz' [27], which is a single‑oscillator sound that's very prominent in the choruses, and the 'warm Rhodes' [8 & 37], which is a sine wave‑like, spacey sound. The compressor on the '360 piano' squashes it, so it bursts more out of the speakers; I love compression and am definitely guilty of regularly over‑compressing! The EQ on the piano took off a lot of the bottom end and added at 3.9kHz to make it cut through more. Again, there's the sample delay, with the ultra‑short delays to make it sound fatter and like it's out of phase. The '360 clavinet' has a Bit Crusher plug‑in to dirty up the sound with digital distortion. It works a bit like the Lo‑fi plug-in in Pro Tools: you can lower the amount of bits and it makes it sound very digital. The Tremolo plug‑in is set to 8th notes, so you get this rhythmic, pulsing thing, and the compressor, again, squashes quite a bit. There's an Auto Filter on the 'warm Rhodes' that effectively works like a low‑pass filter, like you would have on a Moog synth. On track 37 I also have Guitar Amp Pro, this time for the simulated amp sound, and Tape Delay, which has an LFO function that sounds like a warble, a bit like a Memory Man delay pedal. I love that pedal and just purchased three to stock up in case they stop making them. The 'bass lil fuzz' is a swirling sound that has a Vocoder plug‑in on it like a slow LFO opening and closing, and a Flanger plug‑in adding more of a swirly effect. The tape delay is there to create a reverby effect.”

Most of the sound sources came from Logic's EXS24 sampler or one of its soft synths, like the ES2 'bass lil fuzz' keyboard part.Most of the sound sources came from Logic's EXS24 sampler or one of its soft synths, like the ES2 'bass lil fuzz' keyboard part.

"The strings are all electronic, the main one being the 'VI Trmolo FF' [12], which is a pretty loud and washy viola string patch, and then there are the swirly sounds, 'CHMB 3 VLNS', on tracks 27 and 35. The first channel EQ on track 12 takes off low end and the second one dips at 275Hz. There's a Sample Delay to, again, fatten up the sound and confuse its exact placing. Bus 1 goes to the Space Designer reverb plug‑in. For me, using plug‑ins is a way of programming sounds, and you can see a good example on tracks 27 and 35, which have Flanger, Vocoder, Limiter, EQ, Tape Delay and the Space Designer.”

Mix bus: Logic Multipressor

"Finally, I mixed back into Logic, and put the stereo mix through a Multipressor, Logic's multi‑band compressor. Mastering people probably hate me for it, but I really like what it does, and I put it over most of my stereo mixes. Once the mixes were approved by Lily and the record company, I sent the mastering engineer the 24‑bit files.” .

The Rough Mix Makes It To The Record (Nearly)

"My initial rough mix of 'The Fear' really got the record company excited,” explains Greg Kurstin. "They asked Spike [Stent] to mix 'Everybody Is At It' and 'The Fear', and I really loved what he did. His mixes sounded so good that they changed my approach to my mixes. Hearing how he had treated my sounds was an education and opened up new perspectives for me. I loved that he wasn't afraid to use dynamics, turning things up in the chorus or have things coming in really loudly. Also the way he used EQ and adjusted the vocals and the kick drum and opened up the top and the bottom ends was great. His mixes had a real life about them and they became a template for me during mixing.

"Everybody loved Spike's mix of 'Everyone Is At It', but the record company ended up using my mix of 'The Fear'. I think it was simply a case of demo‑itis, with the record company being attached to my earlier version. I think I was the only one who did not like it! (laughs) So I went back and said to them that I'd like to try a few things, which were mostly inspired by Spike's mix of 'Everyone Is At It'. My mix sounded so narrow and didn't really sound open like his mix. So I really tried to improve things and they ended up going with my new version. It was a matter of making things simpler, so that a few elements stand out and the rhythm sounds more straightforward but still driving. And of course making sure you can hear the vocals, because it's important to hear what Lily is singing.

"To achieve this I went back to mixing just the drums, the vocals, and the bass, and built the track from there. I did a lot of experimentation. I'm beginning to be more aware of what I'm doing, but for most of the time it's a matter of take this or that sound out, put something else in, and see whether it sounds better or not, and so on. I also do a lot of muting, and again, if it sounds better, I simply go with that. I'll also pile on plug‑ins, because I'm always afraid that I can't go back to where I was. So instead of altering an EQ plug‑in that's already there, I'll add a second and a third EQ plug‑in, and if it doesn't work I can just bypass it again to get back to where I was. You'll see a lot of redundant plug‑ins on my edit windows, and I'm probably breaking many rules.

"Specifically, the changes in my updated mix of 'The Fear' centred around adding more bottom and more air at the top end, particularly on the vocals and the drums. I may also have taken out some of the drums and looked for a kick drum that was a little punchier. There was a lot going on in the initial mix, particularly the low‑mid, which was a bit muddy, so I removed things in that section, until I began hearing things more individually. I also tried to EQ the guitar intro to make it a little bit less harsh, but then it felt like it was missing something, and I reverted to the way it was. It's funny, I do that a lot: go through a whole process and then end up realising that I'm making the mix worse, and return to the way it was at the beginning.”

Jimi Hendrix, reportedly, was one of the first artists whose creative process involved having the tape running all the time in the recording studio. It's a sprawling way of working that involves endless trawling through recorded material to mine the highs from the humdrum. U2 are among the most famous present‑day adherents of this working method, and, with technology more complex and recording budgets much larger, the Irish band's approach is vastly more expansive and Byzantine than Hendrix could ever have dreamt of. In fact, it is so intricate and seemingly endless that guitarist The Edge recently joked that U2 albums "don't get finished, they just get released”.

The band's latest 'unfinished' release, No Line On The Horizon, was the result of sessions lasting almost two years, beginning in June 2007 in Fez (Morocco), then moving on to The Edge's place in the South of France, to U2's Hanover Quay studio in Dublin, Platinum Sound Studios, New York, and finally, in late 2008 and early 2009, to Olympic Studios in London. It involved U2's customary process of writing, recording, editing and mixing, followed by ceaseless rewriting, re‑recording, re‑editing, and remixing, in any possible order and often simultaneously. At least 20 people were directly involved in assisting the band during the sessions, including a posse of engineers, mixers, assistants, drum, guitar and studio techs, and so on, plus, of course producers Daniel Lanois (see box) and Brian Eno, with help from Steve Lillywhite.

Central to the technical side of things was Dubliner Declan Gaffney, who engineered three songs, mixed 'Get On Your Boots' and 'White As Snow', co‑mixed five others, and has additional engineering credits for almost all the tracks. It's fair to say that No Line On The Horizon was a jump into the deep end for 27‑year old Gaffney, whose previous CV constitutes mainly assistant credits. Gaffney spent three and a half years working with Van Morrison, followed by a year at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin, and another year at Metropolis in London, and was asked in February 2008 whether he'd be willing to work in U2's studio in Dublin as an assistant engineer, where his role quickly became more important.

Keeping Track Of It All

U2 took up residence at Olympic Studios, London, during the late stages of the making of No Line On The Horizon.U2 took up residence at Olympic Studios, London, during the late stages of the making of No Line On The Horizon.Photo: Kevin Davies

One of Gaffney's main tasks was to help keep track of what was happening. "My job when I first started working with U2 was to tape‑op the Radar [digital multitrack], and man the DAT recorder, which runs all the time. The main thing about working with Radar is that you can very quickly move from one song to the next. When U2 have put down an idea they'll come up with new ideas during the next playback and will just pick up a microphone and start singing or playing guitar, and with Radar you can drop these things in on the fly, without stopping. I couldn't imagine doing a writing session with these guys using Pro Tools, because you simply don't have time to create three new tracks and put them in record. That new guitar or drum part could have vanished into thin air by then.

"The only thing that's tricky at the studio here is that we still manually patch everything; there's no such thing as routing. So when the sessions move at a million miles an hour, which they do, it can be really frantic to re‑patch things when they suddenly decide to work on another song. The outputs of the mixing desk are split to go to the Radar and the DAT, and I made notes of everything that was going on. Sometimes you get a directive, like 'Mark so and so on the DAT,' but for most of the time you need to use your own initiative. Literally months later someone will turn round and say 'We did this Joy Division‑like bass line on this song one day, can you find that?' You then need to go through your notes to see if there is a reference to a Joy Division‑like bass part, and use your own memory. It may sound like looking for a needle in a haystack, but funnily enough, the system works. The assistant engineer makes notes of absolutely everything, no matter how insignificant it may seem. The band comes up with millions of ideas all the time, and everything gets a name. After we moved the project to Pro Tools the comments fields were also always full with information, so that if three months later someone wanted a hear the hook in a chorus of such and such a take, you could go back seven Playlists and find it.”

Daniel Lanois at the riad in Fez where No Line On The Horizon was begun.Daniel Lanois at the riad in Fez where No Line On The Horizon was begun.Photo: Anton CorbijnGaffney must have impressed the other members of the company, because he soon graduated from tape‑op to acting as a fully fledged engineer and mixer. And so, when the band decided in June 2008 to go to Edge's house in the south of France for some more writing sessions, Gaffney was invited along. By this time, the project was moved over to Pro Tools. "We wanted to keep the recording setup small, so we just had a few microphones, a Control 24, Pro Tools, and three drives, so we could move easily and quickly between different songs. Other than Pro Tools, the recording setups for most of the sessions were pretty similar. Edge's old Neve desk was pulled apart for on‑location recording, and its 1091 and 1093 mic preamps were racked. Everything was going through these mic pres, or a small Neve sidecar, then through any required outboard, and monitoring was via two Mackie 24‑channel desks. When we went to Platinum in New York we had a much larger setup, with guitars and amplifiers everywhere. The idea had been to mix at Platinum, but the band was still adding overdubs, or wanted sections added or taken out during mixing. This will happen right up until the morning the album goes to mastering. The songs go through so many permutations, in some cases you wouldn't recognise the original versions.”

As Daniel Lanois explains, 'Get On Your Boots', the first single from No Line On The Horizon, was a case in point. "It came from The Edge's workshop. He had that riff all along, and he was very excited about it, and we served it the best we could. Almost all the other material came from the sessions in Fez and France, and their beginnings were rhythmic. Brian came in with a lot of rhythmic computer preparations, which he piped into Larry's headphones, and Larry then improvised a beat running in tandem with these Eno beginnings. This immediately brought us to a fantastic rhythmic place, and gave us the opportunity to approach our instruments in a way that we had never done before.

"Bono's singing is fantastic these days, so we were also afforded the luxury of some great vocal performances, live with the band. The best emotional tracks are always recorded when you have the singer in the room with you, and that was the case on this record. We don't like living with a promise: we pursue something because we are excited about it. So a lot of the effects get printed along the way. We only ever operate on excitement, and it's not a good idea to try to recreate effects on another day. We also don't want to wait for the mix. For example, I'd do all kinds of things to The Edge's guitar sound, putting it back through an amplifier and re‑miking it, and so on. He also did some nice slide guitar solos on the record that I processed through various outboard boxes to make them as exciting as possible.”

Early Beginnings

U2's The Edge and Adam Clayton thrash out an arrangement in Fez.U2's The Edge and Adam Clayton thrash out an arrangement in Fez.Photo: Anton Corbijn

'Get On Your Boots' was recorded by the band in the first half of 2008 at Hanover Quay, and then extensively reworked there. "Edge came in with a version of the song that had the riff. When the band started a new version of the song in Dublin, we recorded Edge's guitar, a loop by Eno, drums, Adam's bass, a guide vocal, and overdubbed the percussion and keyboards. Some sections were slightly longer than in the released version, and there used to be this extended guitar solo that Dan had taken sections of and turned them around, so you had alternating forwards and backwards guitar. Then one evening Edge had the idea for half‑time drums underneath the guitar, and everyone was like 'That's fucking cool!' One night Edge also overdubbed a really cool guitar part, that was named 'Spirit of punk rock', which is a reference to 'The spirit of jazz', a character in the Mighty Boosh TV show.

"Generally speaking, the last thing to be added to a U2 track is the lead vocal, so when we were in France, Bono worked extensively on the lyrics, the phrasing and getting the right vocal approach. Of the other tracks I was involved in mixing, 'Fez' came out of Edge playing this cool guitar sound in Fez, and Danny sampled it and chopped it up and remapped out the guitar part, and put some kind of rhythmic element behind it. Then Brian treated it and added atmospherics — you can hear a Moroccan marketplace, for instance. Brian, Dave Emery and I mixed the track in relay fashion; the two of them started the mix and I finished it towards the end of the project. Dan and I mixed 'Cedars Of Lebanon' together, live, with everyone in the room, on a K‑series SSL at Platinum. Dan insisted on doing this as a performance mix: we redid each mix pass from scratch, rather than use automation and tweak previous mixes. Dan and I also mixed 'Moment Of Surrender' and 'Unknown Caller' at Platinum on the console, and we then used stems from these mixes to tweak them when we were at Olympic in London. But the mixing work on 'Boots' in Olympia was done in the box. When we came to Platinum we had these huge analogue SSL desks and we decided to run some of the in‑the‑box mixes via them, and compared that to the in‑the‑box versions, and we decided to stay in the box where we could.”

Declan Gaffney's go‑to processing for Adam Clayton's bass involves Digidesign's Digirack EQ, Cranesong's Phoenix Dark Essence (both top) and the Massey L2007 limiter (below). The Sansamp plug‑in was used to dirty up the sound for four bars.Declan Gaffney's go‑to processing for Adam Clayton's bass involves Digidesign's Digirack EQ, Cranesong's Phoenix Dark Essence (both top) and the Massey L2007 limiter (below). The Sansamp plug‑in was used to dirty up the sound for four bars.Secrets Of The Mix Engineers: Declan GaffneySecrets Of The Mix Engineers: Declan GaffneySecrets Of The Mix Engineers: Declan GaffneyLanois has always advocated the idea of mixing as a performance, and unsurprisingly, his two studios, in Los Angeles and Toronto, are each built around a console, a 38‑channel Neve 8068 and a Midas 4000 respectively. So how does he retain that performance aspect while working in the box? Lanois: "It's difficult, but I found a way of working with it that still allows me to take advantage of my instincts. I don't sit behind the screen myself, but work with an engineer, like the mighty Declan, and I get very specific, saying things like: 'Go to this section, take this out, put this in, make this louder, make that quieter, pan that hard to the left,' and so on. So no tiny moves, only quite broad strokes. And I work in sections. Once a section has radical moves, it usually dictates what happens in the next section. The potential pitfall of working in the box is that the changes are very tiny and take a long time. So I prefer to stick with a broad stroke philosophy. That seems to work. And one of the advantages of mixing in the box is that you can go back to where you were at the push of a button.”

Declan Gaffney: "The mix of 'Boots' evolved over time. The original impulse happened one night in Dublin when Edge and I were laying down the 'Spirit of punk rock' guitar, and we changed the balance of the song, taking out the three tom mics completely. Edge asked me to put down the mix, which I did on a CD. A couple of months later, just before we were due to go to France, he called me and asked for that mix of 'Boots'. I told him that it was done on a Mackie, which doesn't have recall, but that I would try to recreate it from listening to the original and from memory. I spent a whole day in Dublin, using Pro Tools and an Icon and lots of plug‑ins, to try to get that balance and sound again. I remember thinking 'This sounds OK, but I think I can make it better,' and so I saved the mix as I had it, in case Edge wouldn't like where I took it, and did some more things to it. I sent that mix to Edge, and he liked it, and we tweaked some sections, and he overdubbed another acoustic guitar, which you can hear in the chorus.

"After that, Bono put down his new vocal performances in France. We didn't work on the song at Platinum, though I would sometimes open up the file and listen to how it sounded in that room, and tweak it accordingly. When we were at Olympic, we changed and added some sections, and put the final hand on the mix. In May 2008 Steve Lillywhite had worked on another version of the song, which was more rock & roll, and really good, but it wasn't what the band was looking for. For the finally released version, the 'let me in the sound' section was changed; the band wanted me to make it a bit crazier, and one night when I was working on the song, when I thought everyone had gone home, Bono happed to walk by and came in, and together we realised that that section didn't need fairy dust, but just to get the snare and kick f**king loud. We did some work on the outro as well, and finished the mix. But the end result is 90 percent the mix that I did on my own in Dublin. By the way, the work on the song in Olympia was done in the box. When we came to Platinum we had these huge analogue SSL desks and we decided to run some of the in‑the‑box mixes via them, and compared that to the in‑the‑box versions, and we decided to stay in the box where we could.

"There are loads of tracks in the 'Boots' [Pro Tools] Sessions — a lot more than you can see, because of the amount of ideas that people had during the recording process. The end result is essentially what happened live, but they are always trying new ideas. Working with U2 is an evolutionary process of constant writing, recording, and mixing all at the same time, and as soon as a decision is made not to use a track, it's pulled down to the bottom of the Session and hidden, so it can't play accidentally. But it will be labelled and have comments, so we can always revert back to it. We'll have track culls now and then, when the Sessions become too big and unwieldy. We'll do a 'save' marked as pre‑clean‑out, and then clear out the tracks and carry on. If you saw the Pro Tools Session folder for each song, you'd see hundreds of different versions of that Session, so the band can revert to a favourite balance or mix at any time.”

The Edge's guitar sound is usually shaped through pedals rather than at the mixing stage. An exception was the 'James Bond guitar' part, which was radically thinned with EQ.The Edge's guitar sound is usually shaped through pedals rather than at the mixing stage. An exception was the 'James Bond guitar' part, which was radically thinned with EQ.Secrets Of The Mix Engineers: Declan Gaffney"If you were to look at the 'Boots' Mix window picture with the bass plug‑ins, you'd see the Eno loop on the left, and all the main drum stuff to the left of that. To the right are two overheads and a bongo part. 'Taurus' is a Moog Taurus bass pedal — Danny is always into getting the low end right, and the pedal is doubling Adam's live bass in the verses. 'Edge Floor A' and 'Edge Floor B' are the two mics with which his live take was recorded — 'floor' is a U2 term for a live take. You can also see the 'Nu Riff' track marked as 'spirit of punk rock'. 'Backwards loops' is Dan's backwards treatment of an Edge guitar solo, which you can hear in the outro. 'Prime Time' is Dan creating textures and atmospherics with delays and things. The Sessions are as organised as they can be, so you can understand what's going on and quickly know where you are. I arrange and clean up the Sessions when the band isn't there.”

"Adam's bass is really cool, low‑sounding, with no top in it. It's the sound he gets. It's pretty much the lowest bass you'll ever hear. I have a Digirack seven‑band EQ on it during the whole track, notching out 108.3Hz and 193.3Hz, and cutting above 6kHz. It's a weird EQ curve, but that's how it ended up. I don't pay attention to what the curve looks like. I also had a Dark Essence on a Sapphire setting. It appears to add a little bottom and top and makes it sound a bit sweeter, like a compressor that isn't working. It's one of those plug‑ins that can just improve the sound.”

"Using the Massey L2007 Mastering Limiter on bass is a trick I learned from Rick Rainey. It's really good at getting an even bass sound. It flattens the bass, but it doesn't make it sound compressed. It just allows you to set the level, and bang, that's it. Finally, the Sansamp is automated to come in just for four bars immediately after the first chorus, where Edge plays an overdub called 'James Bond Guitar'. Many other instruments drop out at that point, leaving the bass kind of exposed. The natural bass sound is so low that it didn't really have any mids, so to make it cut through more, I dirtied it up with the Sansamp, to give it more guitar‑like frequencies and to make sure that the James Bond guitar can sound quite small, which was the idea. The Sansamp plug‑in comes in again during the 'let me in the sound' section, where it's just bass, drums, vocals and a textural guitar solo, and it again fills the hole in that section.”

Guitars: Digidesign Digirack EQ, Massey CT4

"As I said earlier, Edge tends to find his own sound, so normally you don't do much to his guitar tracks, other than EQ them a bit and balance them. The 'James Bond' overdub is one exception. It was done a few months after the main tracks were laid down, and it happens only once, immediately after the first chorus. Towards the end of the mix, Edge said to me 'It needs to sound small,' so I EQ'ed pretty much out of it with the Digirack. Instead of this really great big guitar sound, which is what he usually goes for, it was this cool, small sound that's not in your face. The EQ does look quite extreme, doesn't it? There's also a Massey CT4 compressor on the James Bond guitar, which is just touching it, to even things out a little bit for consistency.”

Most of Bono's vocals were recorded through a Shure Beta 58 dynamic mic, with some EQ (including the Waves VEQ3, top) and heavy compression from the Fairchild 660 plug‑in. No reverb was used, but Sound Toys' Echo Boy provided delay. Most of Bono's vocals were recorded through a Shure Beta 58 dynamic mic, with some EQ (including the Waves VEQ3, top) and heavy compression from the Fairchild 660 plug‑in. No reverb was used, but Sound Toys' Echo Boy provided delay. Secrets Of The Mix Engineers: Declan GaffneySecrets Of The Mix Engineers: Declan Gaffney

"I used the Waves VEQ3 to get rid of some of the thickness in the voice that came from using the 58/Neve/LA2A signal path [see 'Tracking 'Get On Your Boots'' box]. I'm cutting at 700Hz, just to sweeten it a little. I like the VEQ3, because it's great for broad brushstrokes. I'll use the Digirack for precise surgery; you can take specific frequencies out very quickly with it, and it won't change the sound too much. It's a 'go‑to' plug‑in for me. The Fairchild 660 plug‑in is doing quite a lot of heavy compression. You can see that the input gain is up quite high, and that means the signal is hitting the compressor hard. Bono's voice sounds really good with this plug‑in, or with the Bomb Factory 1176. If the one isn't working, I'll try the other. His voice also likes the SSL compressor, and I use the RVox here to soften things a little bit, it's not doing very much. The Digirack Trim is used to turn the output of the Fairchild down, it's not there for sonic purposes.

"There's also a seven‑band Digirack EQ that notches out around 245Hz and adds some top end above 10k for some sparkle. The Digirack De‑esser and Echo Boy are on a separate track, because I wanted to hit the De‑esser first, so that any kind of sibilance didn't hit the echo. The echo is just a kind of warm ping‑pong sound. There's no reverb on the track, there's not even any feedback on the delay, it's all about the dry sound with a little bit of space on the side, provided by the delay. In fact, there's no echo in the whole song. I recall Dan making a joke about how we were trying not to use any echo on this record. It didn't require it. I'm not a huge fan of reverb anyway; it's better to do the same thing with delays.”

"I always put on some mastering plug‑ins, and we then listen and decide whether they work or not. Edge preferred these plug‑ins, so they remained.

"I printed the mix through an Aux track. The stereo mix hits the SSL compressor first, on a setting that lets all the transients go through, and yet makes it sound very punchy. It's hitting the Massey L2007 mastering limiter after that, and the way the two act together works really well. While the SSL takes care of making the sound snappier, the L2007 takes off some peaks. The Massey has a very fast attack, which helps the vibe. I also tried the L1 limiter, but didn't like it, and switched it off. Cranesong do this box called the HEDD192, and the Dark Essence plug‑in is more or less a plug‑in version of that. It simply makes the mix sound better. The Waves VEQ4 is a Neve 1081 recreation, and I add a little at 100Hz, 270Hz and at 15K, again to improve the sound and for some sweetness. It's not surgery. The Neve is just there to make the whole track smile.” .

Tracking 'Get On Your Boots'

Declan Gaffney: "Most of 'Get On Your Boots' was recorded in Dublin by Richard Rainey, and the basic backing tracks were done live, by the whole band together. There was an [Electro‑Voice] RE20 inside the bass drum, with an SE Electronics Titan on the outside, a [Shure] 57 underneath the snare, and Richard had his own Heil mic on top, which he alternated with a Beyer M201; the toms were [Sennheiser] 421, overheads Coles 4038; ride cymbal was sometimes a 57, sometimes a [AKG] 451. Everything went through the Neve 1091 or 1093 mic pres. The microphone on the bass cabinet was a Shure SM7 going into a Neve preamp into an LA2A; the DI wasn't used. The SM7 was the only bass mic that was used on the whole record, it's great for bass guitar!

"Edge's thick guitar sound is entirely from the live band session, recorded with two Royer 121s, one on his Fender Deluxe and the other on his AC30, and the mics went through the Neve and then an LA2A, though it's not doing anything, it was just there for the sound. When recording Edge's cabinets, it's almost always a 121, or a Sennheiser 409, occasionally a 57. I record completely flat, because Edge will have found a great guitar sound, and you just record it.

"When we were in France, we got this great vocal sound that Bono really liked, which was a [Shure] Beta 58, going through a 1091 and then an LA2A, into Pro Tools. I even A/B'ed the different 58s and Neves, and found my favourite LA2A, to get the best ones. I'm very proud of the vocal sound. I added a bit of compression while he was singing, and he got excited by that and adjusted his voice accordingly. When we were at Olympic, the vocal chain changed a little. I normally have two or three 58s up in a room, and at Olympic one of them would go through a Neve preamp and the LA2A, but the other would be Neve and then Distressor, and I actually preferred that sound. The LA2A sounded a little too thick. The Distressor had a sort of hardness that balanced the thickness out better. Edge's vocals were also recorded with one of the 58s.”

Daniel Lanois: Producing No Line On The Horizon

Producer and artist Daniel Lanois' association with U2 goes back to 1984, when Eno and he helped reinvent the band's sound on The Unforgettable Fire. Since then, Lanois and Eno have worked on classic U2 albums like The Joshua Tree (1987), Achtung Baby (1991) and All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000). For No Line On The Horizon, one of his contributions was to encourage the band to work in Fez, Morocco, in May and June 2007.

"We went there because we wanted to be at a spiritual crossroads and we felt that Fez had that to offer, musically. We thought of it as a Mecca of sorts. We wanted to be in a geographical location that was filled with plenty of music, and that didn't have the usual fangs of the music business and expectations. Was it to do with going to a Muslim country? We did not speak about that. We spoke about mutual ground. I think that there's something ancient in that location that gets in your bones. And I think that it's a good inspiration for music to draw upon historical sources. Yes, you can listen to music from the '80s, the '70s, and maybe the '60s, and think that some kind of mimicry will serve you. But why not look back at a thousand years and see what comes your way?

"We hired a riad, which is a large building with an open courtyard, rolled in an 18‑wheeler truck full of U2's Dublin gear, and set up in the courtyard. The truck had about eight racks of gear for the Edge, one guitar pedal for me, a microphone for Bono, drums for Larry, and a bunch of recording gear. We recorded to Radar. I highly recommend it, it's a great machine. The riad had a sort of automatic roof that could be peeled away, so we could play in the open sky, which is to be highly recommended. The courtyard works like an ancient ventilation system; the warm air escapes and the walls provide you with shade. The co‑writing invitation from the band was very kind and very sweet. The fact is, we play well together, Eno, U2 and I, and those beginnings in Fez were very productive. Just a few weeks of recording provided us with many fascinating beginnings, beautiful landscapes, isolated moments, and poetry. It was all there. It was like a harvest.”

In a recent interview, the Edge explained that his Death By Audio Supersonic Fuzz Gun inspired his approach to the guitar on the new album. Lanois: "You mean his guitar pedal? I'm sure he's right about that. But he has so many pedals that I have lost track of them. The Edge's corner is like a minefield of pedals and you don't want to go to his corner for fear of never coming out again. My one pedal? That's a little looping box called a Boomerang. There are lots of strange repeating sounds on the record and some of them come from the Boomerang.”

"The mixing stage took place at Platinum Sound in New York. I forget all the reasons why we went to New York, but I think one of them was that we could use three rooms at the same time in one building. Eno, two mixing engineers, and I, had a song brewing in each room and we were able to waltz from one room to another. There's something nice about having three songs burning at once. We did the same at Olympic Studios in London, where we did the final mixing sessions, during which Steve Lillywhite helped out with the production and mixing. I think that things worked out really well and that the album contains some of the band's best work.”